Congressional websites befouled by mucky-mouthed hackers

A number of Congressional websites were defaced with abuse aimed at President Obama following Wednesday's State of the Union address.

Websites maintained by Congressmen including Charles Gonzalez (Texas), Spencer Bachus (Alabama) and Brian Baird (Washington) were replaced with a one-line abusive message aimed at Obama by the "Red Eye Crew" from Brazil in the early hours of Thursday morning. The affected sites are all hosted on the house.gov domain, but only a minority of sites resident on the domain were hacked to display digital graffiti. Some Congressional committee websites were also affected.

At least some of the affected sites remain defaced on Thursday morning.

Un-Congressional language

A full list of affected sites and additional commentary on the mass defacement can be found in a post by security blogger Praetorian Prefect here.

Praetorian Prefect reports that the common thread linking the defaced sites was use of the Joomla content management system. Even though many other Congressional sites based on Joomla remain unaffected, this still suggests that the long-active Red Eye Crew defacement gang used flaws in Joomla to pull off its latest hack.